The Old Glory Club (OGC) is an all-male, not-so-secret secret society on the American right. They likely have a few hundred members.
To get in, you have to email a clandestine email address and they screen you with written interview questions. Then you have provisional membership where you attend a bunch of meetings before they determine whether you’re cool.
But it’s also highly decentralized, and some chapters are really paranoid. I know that one OGC chapter in a major metro requires ID verification and you have to do an in-person interview in a suit.
Members generally range from their early twenties to their mid-forties. Many have large Twitter followings; many also belong to their local Young Republicans or Republican clubs. They use the OGC as a coordination group to collectivize the young member bloc to infiltrate and push both organizations Right. And because it’s a secret society, the boomer-run Republican clubs aren’t even aware this is happening. It’s pretty ingenious actually.
I am not a member, partly because I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member; partly because, as a humble immigrant, I respect the club’s emphasis on old-stock/heritage American identity and have no desire to subvert it; and partly because I am Catholic, with religious objections to joining secret societies.
Still, the secrecy only goes so far. I spoke freely with about a dozen members and former members for this article. I am withholding their names, but nobody seemed particularly reluctant to talk. Several are airing their grievances openly on Twitter. Whatever discretion the club usually maintains, its internal feud has now spilled out onto the public square.
Until this week’s split, OGC had 40 chapters nationwide, with quaint names like Indiana’s Tippecanoe Society, Virginia’s Vetus Dominium Club, New England’s New Ivy League, Alabama’s Magnolia League, and the Yellow Dog Pack in Florida.
Now it’s 38 chapters.
Two days ago, the Nathanael Greene Society, OGC’s North Carolina chapter, announced that it had been notified of its “disaffiliation from the Old Glory Club.”
Thirty-four minutes later, the Lewis and Clark Society, the Montana chapter, announced its own removal.
What happened?
The Montana Disaffiliation
I contacted the Montana chapter, whose members provided me with a copy of the open letter they say prompted their expulsion.
One of its central grievances is blunt: “Outright hatred of America has no place in our club.” Members resented having their local, grassroots work overshadowed by statements from elsewhere in the organization:
“Everything we build in Gallatin County is exposed to whatever the loudest voices in the OGC said last if we remain in the OGC. Most often, we are embarrassed.”
When I asked for examples of this alleged anti-American behaviour, they sent me screenshots documenting another chapter president’s posts and activities, who:
Wore a keffiyeh to the national convention
Burned his MAGA hat
Called America a “corpse” and said “America” no longer means what it once did
Said he would not vote for JD Vance and advocated “voting down ballot blue” in the midterms
Repeatedly referred to the Trump administration as “ZOG”
Wrote: “I’d take an Islamic occupied government over a Zionist occupied government any day.”
Purchased a Hezbollah-style patch featuring George Washington
Called Republicans “the BROWN party” and “the party of BROWNS”
Joked about an American pilot being shot down over Iran, converting to Sufism, and being pro-Iran
Used a Twitter banner reading “Old Glory Club” in English lettering stylized to resemble Arabic calligraphy
Admittedly, not great optics for an organization that prides itself on trad aesthetics.
Still, one edgy guy does not establish the politics of an entire organization.
The Montana members sent examples of a couple of other members expressing anti-Israel and pro-Muslim sentiments. Their broader accusation was that OGC’s national leadership tolerated—and sometimes shared—a worldview that mixed hostility toward Israel (what the “Plan Trusters” would call “obsession with the JQ”) with apologetics for Hamas and Hezbollah and contempt for America.
Pro-Trump accounts are calling this worldview “Third Worldism”:
Reihan Salam, the Bangladeshi president of the Manhattan Institute, writing in Sapir Journal — which describes itself as a “journal exploring the future of the American Jewish community” — deigns to be the authority to define it:
“Third Worldism, a fusion of anti-Zionism, anti-Westernism, and anti-capitalism that places the sacralized victimhood of Palestinian Arabs at the center of a larger struggle against American imperialism. Unlike Islamism, Third Worldism is not primarily a religion-based ideology. Its most committed adherents, such as Mamdani himself, tend to lead largely secular lives. But, in important respects, it presents the more consequential long-term ideological challenge. Where jihadism targets American civilians as part of a larger struggle to overthrow “apostate” regimes in the Muslim world, Third Worldism endeavors to transform the nation’s ideological-intellectual milieu, shaping how Americans — well beyond the Muslim minority — understand their country and its place in the world.”
Some right-wingers who fell for this Manhattan Institute-spread meme sincerely believe they are describing sympathy for America’s enemies, often coupled with support for Muslim immigration. But the conflation also serves a political purpose for the more calculating, cunning, Zionists who intentionally spread it: it seeks to make hostility toward Israel synonymous with hatred of America, and to make love for Israel synonymous with patriotic love for America.
Another grievance in the Montana letter concerned what members called “the email incident.”
After a journalist published a hostile hitpiece about OGC, a member wrote an email to the enemy journalist saying, “Hey I am a liberal and a multi-time Democrat voter and I am in the OGC. You misunderstand us. Journalist to Journalist, you should take down your article.”
For some Montana members, this was a rude awakening. They understood their chapter as an organizing vehicle for the American right. Yet the broader organization apparently included a self-described liberal journalist who repeatedly voted Democratic. The ensuing internal debate compounded their frustration: figures in OGC’s national leadership opposed treating past support for Trump or Republican candidates as a reasonable membership standard.
Furthermore, some Catholic members wanted all Freemasons excluded, while some Protestant members wanted all Pagans excluded. Most Christians wanted atheists excluded. Some MAGA loyalists, meanwhile, wanted to exclude anyone who did not vote straight Republican. These were serious points of contention.
The Montana chapter president described to me the resulting identity problem:
“Frankly we had a number of embarrassing situations where people would come to us and ask us what the OGC was, and we couldn’t say definitively because the [Montana chapter] is a men’s Christian fraternity with right-wing politics but we couldn’t say that concretely of the OGC because we kept being embarrassed by public things like the email incident and the [pro-Muslim sentiment].”
He nevertheless rejected the idea that the dispute was fundamentally about Israel or loyalty to Trump:
“Something I would like to make clear is that many people in my club that was disaffiliated from the OGC do not like Donald Trump. We all have quite strong views on Israel (negative) and we are not at all neocon Zionist Republican types. We don’t have a neocon/zionist in the group.
…
We also don’t call ourselves plan trusters. The term used more often is Patriots. Realize that a decent portion of this is a patriotism thing: wanting to save the country and actually liking the country. There is a fair amount of JQ centered wignat third worldism now I suppose leading the OGC, which is funny, considering it’s THE OLD GLORY (stars and stripes) CLUB. I don’t even object to all of their positions or them doing that. The name just increasingly doesn’t fit the club.”
The Montana chapter could dislike Israel themselves while seeing the broader organization’s pro-Muslim and anti-ZOG rhetoric as obstacles to building Republican coalitions. Whatever distinctions they drew privately, being known locally as the “Third Worldist” club was unlikely to help them gain influence.
They were being pragmatic.
Montana’s members had a clear local strategy. They wanted to build the Young Republicans, win control of county and state Republican organizations, and place members in government. As they pursued those goals, they found themselves answering for statements and conduct elsewhere in OGC that they considered unhinged and damaging to their reputation.
“How can we justify a relationship with a national body that consistently attacks the politicians and Republican party we support?”
So they voted on whether to leave.
The vote was split.
The split vote produced a compromise: publish an open letter, then reconsider leaving at year’s end if their concerns remained unresolved. Members wanted clarity about OGC’s mission and membership standards; they were not demanding anyone’s expulsion. The letter posed three questions:
What is the Old Glory Club?
Who belongs in it, and where does it draw the line?
What does a chapter get from the national organization?
According to multiple sources, the national leadership viewed this letter as an ultimatum. Rather than yield to the ultimatum, they kicked them out.
The North Carolina Disaffiliation
Several OGC members I spoke with described the Nathanael Greene Society (NGS) as one of the club’s largest and most active chapters—and among its most enthusiastically pro-Trump. Its members wanted to organize within the Republican Party and turn their connections into political influence. In the view of some members I spoke with, they also wanted to steer OGC itself toward a more explicitly pro-Trump political mission.
That enthusiasm increasingly put them at odds with a national leadership that was largely disillusioned with Trump and angry about the Gaza and Iran wars. The central committee favored a fraternity whose members’ obligations to one another came before loyalty to any president or party.
According to my sources, the North Carolina chapter and national leadership had been clashing over this divide for roughly a year, with leadership increasingly characterizing the chapter’s conduct as “insubordinate.”
I reached out to the North Carolina chapter president and asked whether this narrative I cobbled together was accurate. He told me: “This is accurate. There’s more that could be said but I’m a biased source; and anyway, it may be best to let it lie.”
I then asked him, “what is the general sentiment in NGS toward Israel and Zionist Neocon types?”, and he provided me with the following statement:
“The NGS certainly isn’t Zionist or pro-Israel in the way commonly associated with neocons. At best Israel is one of many allies, who in this case exerts unusually high influence on American politics, and in often negative ways at that. There is no question in our mind that their influence in American life needs to be curtailed.
Many of us have grown concerned in recent years, however, that anti-Israel sentiment was being reconstrued as a wedge issue against the legitimacy of the American state, and rhetoric from central’s publishing organs seemed to track along those lines, as well as rhetoric from central’s close associates. Furthermore, as a Protestant club, we are concerned that this issue is being used to drum up public opposition to evangelicals, who are very dear to us despite their over-affection for Israel.”
The other faction would cynically reply that this is just soft-pedaling a position that doesn’t sell very well publicly at the moment.
Against that backdrop, William Wolfe’s appearance at the National Conservatism (NatCon) conference in Jerusalem became a flashpoint. A former Trump administration official at the State Department and Pentagon, Wolfe delivered a speech 2 weeks ago titled “America First Means America First.” I could not confirm whether he belonged to the Nathanael Greene Society, but sources linked his speech to the chapter’s removal. One called it the breaking point; another considered it a pretext for a separation that had been brewing for months.
The national leadership’s anger centered on Wolfe’s willingness to associate with NatCon’s chairman, Yoram Hazony—the grand Israeli pope of right-wing Zionism. For some OGC members, appearing at a Hazony-led event was itself a betrayal—a purity test Wolfe had failed simply by showing up, regardless of what he said.
Here is his 19-minute speech in its entirety:
I get the sense that his most vocal critics did not actually watch it. Wolfe’s argument was straightforward: you cannot be America First and Israel First. He was telling Israel’s supporters that American interests come first, including when the two countries’ priorities conflict.
That left him caught between two hostile audiences. Right-wing Zionists disliked his message; his critics on the young right objected to the venue. For the latter, appearing at NatCon Jerusalem amounted to jestermaxxing regardless of what he said. They saw him as courting Israel Firsters simply by sharing their stage.
So, while America First was pissed with Wolfe, Israel First was equally pissed.
NatCon has become radioactive because it is widely seen as nakedly an Israeli psyop, perhaps best explained by an astonishing admission from John Podhoretz in a recent podcast:
“[Yoram Hazony] wants to secure intellectual support in America and the West for the annexation of the West Bank and the creation of what people call Greater Israel… but that’s not what he says he’s doing.
What he says he’s doing is ‘understanding nationalism’ and trying to make a bond between Israel and the rest of the conservative world by saying, ‘We’re nationalist and you’re nationalist... We’re all the same.’
But in fact, that is disingenuous…
I’m telling you it’s why he’s doing it, and I’m right because I’ve talked to him about it, and I talked to him about it standing on the West Bank at his house in 1996 or 1997. So, I know that that’s what he wants.”
Thus, getting flown out to Jerusalem to share a stage with Hazony was itself grounds for suspicion and caused everyone to freak out.
What makes this episode interesting beyond OGC is what it suggests about the changing politics of Israel on the young right. It’s a microcosm. Those still defending Trump are dismissed as “Plan Trusters,” forever explaining why the latest betrayal is actually part of the 4D chess plan. They fire back with “Third Worldist,” accusing their critics of hating America because they hate its government’s support for Israel. Both camps insist they are the real America First, and both think the other has been conned.
One thing is clear: open ties to Israel are increasingly becoming a political liability, and Yoram Hazony is increasingly seen as a malignant tumor.
I wish LCS, NGS, and OGC well. You are all patriots who want America to thrive and throw off the yoke of foreign influence. That should count for more than these feuds. Argue about Trump, Israel, and political strategy as fiercely as you like, but NETTR should mean extending one another some charity before reaching for the knives. I hope you can all co-exist peacefully.
Total White Maoist victory
How interesting. Meanwhile DSA cadres have a disciplined pipeline of candidates who are being recruited, trained, funded and obtaining *actual* levers of power in cities like New York, Chicago and Seattle. Follow their playbook. Like all Communists before them, they contain their internal squabbles ruthlessly and efficiently, and relentlessly move on to the larger objective of obtaining institutional power. Twitter feuds are ego and dick-stroking exercises in sheer futility.